Friday, 6 April 2012

A circuitous route from London to Cape Town turned out to involve a kaleidoscope of landscapes ...

Travelling via Amsterdam with an overnight stop, Citizen M at Schiphol was as unlike a functional, boring airport hotel as you could imagine. Bright, primary colours, quirky slogans, a welcoming, user-friendly interior ..

and the most interestingly (though simply) designed hotel rooms I've seen ...

A daytime north-south flight of nearly 12 hours, all in the same time zone, is a pretty pleasant way to travel, and allows some amazing views as the continents go by, far beneath one.

We had breakfast over the snow-covered Alps ...

A movie later (I was watching Jane Eyre and immersed in bleak Yorkshire landscapes) I looked up to find we were traversing the Sahara desert ...

... for hours and hours, seemingly - there's an awful lot of sand ...

The Congo at lunchtime was invisible, covered in dense cloud, but half a book later (I was reading William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise, now engrossed in turn of the century Vienna) ... these lakes and a wide river emerged below the clouds over central Angola ...

(I liked Younger Daughter's reflection on this river landscape) ...

and over a glass of wine around 7 pm, having crossed two continents, we watched an African sunset over the coast of Namibia ...

Let's not dwell on the suitcase that was temporarily lost at some transitional point in the north ... Waking up the next morning to the sunshine in a lush garden at the tip of Africa felt very good indeed ...

... as did re-visiting familiar corners of my mother's indigenous cottage garden in its end of summer colours ...